Postmodernity, with its fluidity, expansiveness and indeterminacy, inevitably opens up questions of confronting the Other and otherness in the ways of verbalisation and in the interpretation of contemporary narratives. The tendency to go beyond binary oppositions and divisions has caused the contemporary narratives to resonate in the heteronomy of different voices, perspectives, motives and themes, where the individual's personal identity is (self)formed through the undulations of life, that is no longer presented as a solid and unambiguously definable form. In this master’s thesis an interpretative and comparative analyses have shown some features of metamorphosis of otherness in selected contemporary Slovenian and foreign novels – “Starec in jaz” by Sarival Sosič (2017), “Po celi ravnini pod nebom” by Jana Putrle Srdić (2022), “Zabubljena” by Ana Marwan (2021), “Real Estate” by Deborah Levy (2021), and “Silencios” by Karla Suarez (1999). These narratives emphasize the yearning for a harmonious feeling of the “wholeness” of the world and yearning for love, understanding, authentic human contact in the world of modern solitudes. The individual is conclusively torn between the need for security and the desire for freedom. The paradox of escape and (self)search, due to the inability to make final and irrevocable decisions, is portrayed as a catachresis of postmodernity – the decisions that are made, realizations and satisfaction of desires are only temporary, always in the awareness of a new one that might follow.
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